While it is known that the process of becoming literate begins in early childhood and usually involves several years of schooling, research related to cognitive characteristics has been done mostly on illiterate adults, and information concerning illiterate children is therefore limited. The aim of the present study, involving 21 illiterate and 22…

The peripheral manifestations of the inherited neuropathies are increasingly well characterized, but their effects upon cranial nerve function are not well understood. Hearing loss is recognized in a minority of children with this condition, but has not previously been systemically studied. A clear understanding of the prevalence and degree of…

The present study attempted to investigate the effect of perceptual-motor training on attention in children with autism spectrum disorders. The participants (20 girls and 20 boys) were divided into experimental and control groups. They were selected from among 85 subjects after primary tests to be matched. The design of the study was…

Much like unpalatable foods, filthy restrooms, and bloody wounds, moral transgressions are often described as "disgusting." This linguistic similarity suggests that there is a link between moral disgust and more rudimentary forms of disgust associated with toxicity and disease. Critics have argued, however, that such references are purely…

Learning to associate auditory information of speech sounds with visual information of letters is a first and critical step for becoming a skilled reader in alphabetic languages. Nevertheless, it remains largely unknown which brain areas subserve the learning and automation of such associations. Here, we employ functional magnetic resonance…

Recent fMRI and TMS studies on idiom comprehension have shown that the prefrontal cortex is involved in idiom processing. Since schizophrenic patients exhibit prefrontal "structural" changes and dysexecutive "behavioural" deficits, we hypothesised an impairment in idiom comprehension, correlating with performance on executive…

The capacity for long-term changes in synaptic efficacy can be altered by prior synaptic activity, a process known as "metaplasticity." Activation of receptors for modulatory neurotransmitters can trigger downstream signaling cascades that persist beyond initial receptor activation and may thus have metaplastic effects. Because activation of…

"Transitive inference" refers to the ability to judge from memory the relationships between indirectly related items that compose a hierarchically organized series, and this capacity is considered a fundamental feature of relational memory. Here we explored the role of the prefrontal cortex in transitive inference by examining the performance of…

B6-Tg/Thy1APP23Sdz (APP23) mutant mice exhibit neurohistological hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease but show intact basal hippocampal neurotransmission and synaptic plasticity. Here, we examine whether spatial learning differently modifies the structural and electrophysiological properties of hippocampal synapses in APP23 and wild-type mice. While…

In an fMRI experiment, we tested experienced singers with singing tasks to investigate neural correlates of voluntary and involuntary vocal pitch regulation. We shifted the pitch of auditory feedback (plus or minus 25 or 200 cents), and singers either: (1) ignored the shift and maintained their vocal pitch or (2) changed their vocal pitch to…

It has been suggested that representing an action through observation and imagery share neural processes with action execution. In support of this view, motor-priming research has shown that observing an action can influence action initiation. However, there is little motor-priming research showing that imagining an action can modulate action…

Charles Sherrington identified the properties of the synapse by purely behavioral means--the study of reflexes--more than 100 years ago. They were subsequently confirmed neurophysiologically. Studying reflex interaction, he also showed that activating one reflex often facilitates another, antagonistic one: "successive induction," which has since…

Research has demonstrated that Long-Evans rats (LER) display superior mnemonic function over Wistar rats (WR). These differences are correlated with endogenous and input-dependent properties of the hippocampus. The present work sought to determine if juvenile pretraining might enhance hippocampal structural markers and if this would be associated…

Gene transcription is essential for the establishment and the maintenance of long-term memory (LTM) and for long-lasting forms of synaptic plasticity. The molecular mechanisms that control gene transcription in neuronal cells are complex and recruit multiple signaling pathways in the cytoplasm and the nucleus. Protein kinases (PKs) and…

Participants saw a small number of objects in a visual display and performed a visual detection or visual-discrimination task in the context of task-irrelevant spoken distractors. In each experiment, a visual cue was presented 400 ms after the onset of a spoken word. In experiments 1 and 2, the cue was an isoluminant color change and participants…